Trump was unique. The Republicans will struggle to find another like him

Liberal and conservative commentators are fast converging on a prediction: Donald Trump might be gone, but Trumpism is here to stay. Of course, the former are anxious that a smooth, smart authoritarian will pick up where Trump left off and make the US join the rightwing populist international of autocrats like Modi, Erdogan and Orbán; the latter are hoping for a Republican party somehow dedicated to an “American worker” who we ought to imagine as a conservative nationalist. Both sides overestimate Trumpism and – still, after all these years – underestimate Trump himself.

Conventional wisdom has it that figures like Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, or even a TV personality like Tucker Carlson are auditioning to claim the Trumpist movement. There is little doubt that the movement is potent: after five years, plenty of citizens deeply identify as Trumpists; and a whole folklore has been built around Maga. The Republican party has every reason to deploy this movement against the Biden administration and combine Mitch McConnell’s Machiavellianism from above with more or less manipulated grass-roots pressure from below, strung along by Fox and talk radio which will never forget that polarization is big business. After all, such a dual strategy – Republican establishment plus Tea party – already served to sabotage crucial parts of the Obama presidency.

While the Tea party paved the road to Trump, the reality TV show host’s persona was indispensable for rightwing populism actually to come to power in the US. This is not a point about charisma – it’s a point about a famous individual (by some accounts the most public American who ever lived) providing a screen on which very different constituents could project their political fantasies. He could appear as what Steven Bannon once called a “blunt instrument” to business interests no less than earnest theorists of a conservative working-class movement.

For all the dismissive talk about Trump’s incompetence, there is no doubt that he has honed one skill for decades: creating and selling illusions. If one believes some of the exit polls (which is a big “if’), he managed throughout his term to keep up the myth of the successful entrepreneur, despite all the evidence to the contrary. But there are also less obvious aspects of Trump being all things to all kinds of people. In contrast to the cerebral, disciplined Cottons and Hawleys (or Paul Ryans, for that matter), he gave conservatives permission to transgress. In this, as in so many other aspects, he resembles Silvio Berlusconi. Starting with the cheeseburgers in the White House to the faux French aristocratic decorations (read: decadence), there was a promise that sinning would be OK – and thereby also owning the earnest puritan progressives.

While many books about the sexual politics of the Trump era remain to be written, it seems not outlandish to suggest that, in addition to the obvious flaunting of misogyny, Trump’s may have been the first conservative kink pornocratic presidency: just think of the ritual humiliations of the likes of Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. The Jerry Falwell Jr episode may well be emblematic for what Trumpism also means. Rather than thinking that a Trumpism with a halfway human face – no more insults, rage tweeting, sexual transgressions, etc – is bound to get the best (or, perhaps, worst) of all worlds, we ought to consider the possibility that these were also the very things that made Trumpism work.

In any event, there is neither a set of coherent ideas which corresponds to a conservative working class Republicanism nor an institution which could implement it. Every five years or so we are being sold some supposed ideological innovation like “red Toryism”, “national conservatism” or whatever slogans various intellectual lightweights come up with. None of it has resulted in a set of plausible policies likely to resonate with majorities. In practice, with the possible exception of Poland’s Law and Justice party, no rightwing populist government has made good on the promise of fighting neoliberal globalization. The reality has been a combination of big business and bigotry, or what American observers have called plutocratic populism: economics for the 1%, culture war (ideally, one that’s never really won) for the masses.

None of this is to say that Trumpism will disappear: plenty of people – far-right grifters in particular – will want to cultivate a kind of “lost-cause movement” centered on a legend of how the leader got stabbed in the back by establishment Republicans. Populists are skillful at creating solidarity through a shared sense of victimization; a community of grievances might be even stronger when its prime representative is out of power than failing to fulfill expectations at the Resolute Desk.

Liberals are right that a rightwing populist playbook has emerged in the 21st century; in theory, it could be copied successfully by a competent authoritarian in the US. As we’ve learnt, neither the Republican party nor significant parts of the electorate would stand in the way of such a figure. As we have also learnt, checks and balances are much more fragile that civics textbook wisdom and liberal complacency (“We are not Hungary or Turkey!”) would have led us to believe. But rather than continuing some more or less romantic Resistance narrative and acting in a morality play with costumes borrowed from the 1920s and 1930s, liberals should learn the simpler lessons from the Obama presidency: do not demobilize on the ground, do not think that Republicans will ever give an inch – and compete not just on the field of more or less technocratic policy solutions but provide folks with a vision going beyond “at least it’s not Trump”.

• Jan-Werner Mueller is currently a fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study and at the research cluster Contestations of the Liberal Script , also in Berlin. Democracy Rules is forthcoming from FSG in the US and Penguin in the UK